Technological change affects all aspects of our lives and our instructional practices must evolve to prepare students for their futures. In this episode, we explore strategies used in one program to prepare students for an industry that is evolving with digital tools. [Music] Thanks for joining us for T for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in
teaching and learning. This podcast series is hosted by John Kaine, an economist, and Rebecca Musher, a graphic designer, and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Our guest today is Ly Gross. Ly is an online learning specialist and an adjunct technology instructor at Sunni Jennese Community College. Welcome Ly. Hey, thank you. Today's TE's are Ly. Are
you drinking tea today? See, the thing is is I know what the honest answer is. You told me. You outed yourself. I did. I meant to make a cup of tea and I didn't. I am drinking a mix of peppermint, spearmint, and teragon tea. Always a good choice. Sean, today I have a decaffeinated Irish breakfast tea, which just seems like an oxymoron. I don't know. It could have been the really strong builder's tea that's decaffeinated, which would really be even more of an
oxymoron. Yeah. We've invited you here today to discuss your course on fashion industry technologies in which students work with AI image generation, 3D virtual design and modeling, magic mirrors, and artificial and extended reality technology. Can you tell us a little bit about this course and what role this course plays in the Genese Community College fashion curriculum? So, the course is actually called
fashion industry technologies. It's an overview course and whereas many of the classes in the curriculum are focused on hands-on making something. Right now, this class is designed to be a little bit more forward-looking. It's not the capstone class, but it does set the students up for their capstone, which is the spring fashion show where they present their final portfolio. And this course really stands out from the rest of the program with the tech that we introduce the students to.
So we do AI generated images, we do 3D garment modeling all on the computer, we do digitized patterning, we do extended reality, we do things that right now they're being used by like the really really big fashion houses. We're talking Gucci, Louis Vuitton. We're doing the kind of work that is being pioneered by them right now. and they use that technology to streamline the whole design process and accelerate to market.
And so my philosophy with the course is that I'm not just teaching students or preparing students for a job in a year or two years. They may go on to another college. I need to prepare them for a job that's going to exist four to five years out. And that's where the focus of this class is. We're giving them early exposure to very very high-tech, very very cutting edge sort of tools that are really shaping the future of fashion.
And honestly, I tell my students every day, it does not matter to me if you learn to press the correct button or you learn the names of all the buttons. What matters to me is that you learned how to think creatively in that new tool. And you learned how to problem solve either with or without the AI. And you learned how to communicate your ideas in new ways and really think about fashion as an experience and not as something that
you cut and sew together. Can you talk a little bit about what students are actually doing? You've talked a little bit about what the technology is, but what are some of the actual things that they're doing in the class? So, the way that I designed the class, and I took this class over from another instructor, and it was kind of funny because she said, "Well, we do this and this and
this and this." And then at the end of the class, you have like these three weeks where you can pick a topic that you want that's on the edge of fashion and do what you want. And I right away I thought, "Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I'm going to let the students pick something and they're all going to pick something different and they're going to share it and we're going to have this wonderful peer experience that's going to be much richer than anything that I
could choose. So, we have two tracks that run sort of side by side throughout the entire semester. On the one hand, they're designing a single outfit that they'll eventually have in the spring fashion show. So, they're using Photoshop and they're using Illustrator and they're using the 3D modeling software and other digital tools and they're realizing that vision. They're working in the digital realm until they realize their vision and then we project it onto the table, cut it out in the
fabric, make it, which is wonderful. So that's like one whole semester long project divided into a series of modules of different parts. But at the same time I have them doing a semesterl long technology project and that can be anything they want to do. I ask them to develop a proposal at the beginning of the class and I approve it and then they go throughout the class and at the end of the class they present whatever their end result is. I have had students who have programmed AI to make sewing
patterns. I've had students who've done custom textile prints and had them printed. I've had students who've made prototypes. I've had prototype motorcycle helmets. Had prototype pants for wheelchair users. All kinds of really cool stuff. One student did an entire video series that was influencer marketing. It's like this is awesome stuff. So, they do that sort of at the
same time. So there's really two tracks going on in the class and they're going on simultaneously and that's just how we run it. Could you elaborate on those two tracks? What components are a students choosing and what components are common to all the students? Well, I'm a glutton for
punishment. The common track where they're all designing an outfit, they are all designing an outfit and they're all at the same place at the same time on the process of designing that outfit, but all of those fits will be different. So, one of them is doing a beach outfit and another one is doing a ball gown made of denim. So, they're all over the map, but they're working side by side using the same tools and they're sort of at the same development process or design process. They're at the same
place. Now, the second track, which is the individual project, they're all over the map. Once they have submitted a proposal and I have approved it, I meet with the students once a week to say, "How are you doing on your project?" We basically have scrum sessions. What did you do last time? What are you going to do next time? What's standing in your way? How can I help you get over whatever your current obstacle is? But I am talking to one student about the
Unreal gaming engine. And then I literally turn around, next student, okay, we're talking about flashing lights that are going to go on your helmet. So, that one's all over the place, but I don't think that students get as much out of the class when it's a set assignment. I prefer that the students pick their assignments. So, in both cases, they pick what they want to do. What role does AI play in the class? I know this is one of the technologies you noted that you're experimenting with
in this class. Is that something that's built into the track that everyone's doing or is that just something that some folks are choosing to do? It's a little bit of both. It shows up in a couple of different ways. So, we do an AI focused unit when we hit Photoshop because we talk about AI image generation and we talk about it from a practical standpoint of what can you do, what can't you do, what are the limits of it right now and we talk about it
from an ethical standpoint. Is it really appropriate for us to be developing, let's say, copies of things? how much of the AI that you're using is actually scraped from somebody else's work and how much of that are you comfortable working with. So, we have those kinds of discussions and I make sure that everybody has those kinds of discussions. A deeper use of AI usually turns up in the research projects and it could be students can use AI to generate mood boards. They can generate new
prints. They can generate something that sparks their own creativity or they can use it maybe to do research. So they could identify trends or do some analysis and use it in that way. I did have one student that tried to program an AI to develop technical patterns and at the end of the day he made it work and I was just like yay. I didn't think you were going to be able to do that. I honestly did not think the project would
work. And I was explaining to the student, if you come to me and you have a paper that says, "Here are five ways I tried it and none of them worked for these reasons, that's an A. I'm going to give you a solid grade on that." And he made it work anyway. He insisted he was going to make it work. You also mentioned that students are using augmented reality and extended
reality. Do you have headsets for all the students or are there a number of headsets that are available that students in the class can use while they're working on these projects? So, we don't. We got a grant this year. It's a President's Innovation Grant that happens every year at GCC and I along with our media technologies department, we wrote up a grant for four VR headsets and five magic mirrors. And the thing about working on those is that when you're developing the environment,
you're not wearing the equipment. So you're sitting on the computer. We have 12 very, very expensive, very, very heavy gaming laptops that we use to do our 3D modeling. And those laptops are the same ones that we use to develop the digital environments. So there's two things that we do with those. We do the magic mirror concept that takes the outfit design that the students have made and it puts it on a human being.
And then we have the extended reality or the virtual reality where we can do a full VR showroom that you can walk around in and see the models and you can reach out and touch the fabrics. You don't get a tactile sense, but if you'd like to know, is this skirt full? You can pick it up and spread it out to see how it looks. How are students responding to using these different
technologies in your class? So, as with all things like each according to their own idea of how they like it or don't, some of the students they jump in and they just absolutely, oh, I'm so excited. Technology, give me give me give me. And some students are very frustrated because I'm essentially teaching them how to design in computer to do a thing that they know how to do
in real life on a mannequin. So, they've already learned how to drape a new garment on a mannequin and create something new and they're getting pretty good at it. And then they have to go back and relearn it on the computer. And of course, you're starting over again. And so, it's very, very slow. It's like learning a new language. like I know how to say this, but how do I say this? And so some of them get very frustrating.
But one thing that's really fun is a student will come in and right at the beginning of the class, you can always tell when it's going to happen cuz they come in and they crack open the laptop and they're all excited and they're like, "Hey, hey, hey, hey, you got to see what I made last night." And just it lights up the whole room and all the frustrations are just out the window and let's get to working on our projects
today. Sounds like that would definitely lend to some momentum in class for sure. Can you talk a little bit about how some of these technologies are being used in other contexts on campus? Are students having opportunities to use extended reality in other spaces beyond the fashion program or some of the other tools that you're talking about? So, I
can talk a little bit about that. I personally would love to bring these tools into a whole bunch of courses, but we're a two-year college and time is tight and there is what you can do is what you can do. So, I'm kind of looking at ways that we can layer it in. So, for example, I mentioned that the students have already learned how to drape on a
mannequin. One of the things that I'm talking to my department chair about is about making my class and that draping class co-requisites so that the students are learning to drape in two modes at the same time and one set of knowledge should be able to feed on the other and that should improve our frustration
level with it. The other thing I'm talking about kind of talking to the dean is about the potential for teaching this class not just to fashion students but to digital arts students and to CIS students. Because when you're creating a brand new avatar and then you're creating garments and accessories on the avatar, the end output of my class, it could be a fashion design. That's what we're doing right now. But the output at the end of my class could just as easily
be a fully rendered digital avatar. And both of those programs could benefit from that technology. So we're having those kinds of discussions. We haven't moved anywhere yet, but I think that's where we're going. You mentioned that students are doing the types of things that higherend designers are doing. Could you talk a little bit about some of the applications that are being used in industry and how that might perhaps motivate students a little bit to see that they're doing something that is
state-of-the-art work? So when you're talking technology, language sometimes gets fluid and becomes difficult because we don't have words for the things that exist. You know, it's like let's go back to the 1800s and ask about a refrigerator. There is no such thing. But what we are doing is the students design the fashion. And when they're designing in real life, they're designing, they're cutting, they're sewing, they're attaching, they're fitting, and they're coordinating and
styling on a real life person. And it's a sort of a I don't want to call it a fixed experience because it can be radically different every time, but it has a very fixed sort of sequencing. And when you talk about some of this virtual technology, a lot of that goes right out the window. So, we can fit clothing onto our bodies before it's ever been made. So, I can make a nice sherpa jacket, okay, with the fuzzy sherpa texture, and I can make accessories and make designs
and patches and what have you on it. And I can put that on my body in my sizing and see in a magic mirror what it's going to look like. And then I can put it on one of my students with a very different body type and see what it's going to look like on her. And it changes the way that we think about the fashion experience. Instead of us producing a solid sort of unchangeable garment, we start to think about ways that you can experience fashion both before it's been made and even after
it's been made. So, some of my students have been inspired to do things. One of my students was inspired to create a lightup design in their fashion that reacts to the user and the user's movement or the wearer's movement. And this is just a way that we're rethinking how we experience fashion. I know you mentioned that students are kind of prepping for a fashion show that follows this course. It's a prequel.
to the fashion show. Can you talk a little bit about how that has evolved over the last couple of semesters or years as students are integrating more and more with different technologies? So, integrating it is actually one of my big struggles at the moment that the students as I said they know how to design a garment on a mannequin and they don't want to learn a new way of doing
things just before the fashion show. And so every year we're sort of increasing the number of requirements or trying to replace the requirements maybe where they have to do x number of designs for the fashion show. Well, now we can maybe do x minus one and then you have to do
one digital. One of the nice things about the spring fashion show is that that's the point where it kind of all comes together where students have been working on a digital image and it's in the computer and they can see it in the magic mirror and they can see it in the VR space, but it's not real. You can't touch it quite yet. And when you project the pattern on the table and you actually cut it out and you sew it together and you put it on a model, now
it's real. Now it's a real thing. I made this really cool digital thing and here it is. It's there. That's fun. I'm sure it's exciting for students to see the things that they've spent a lot of time developing in a digital space and then to see that in a physical space. I know I have that experience with design students who make an image on screen and then they see it in print
or they see it produced, right? When a student designs a new textile pattern or they design a dress and we put it in the digital space and maybe you'll see different people wearing it in the magic mirror, but then we see it in person, that fabric arrives from the vendor or that design is fully formed and it's put on a model who's walking in it. It's a whole full circle moment. I had this vision in my head. I made it happen on the screen and now here it is in real
life. So that's the direction that we're going in and continuously sort of moving that way. Are there other faculty who are teaching fashion courses who are starting to consider using these tools? So far we have not had a lot of crossover between the various classes.
There definitely is the potential there and I think as the technology gets deeper and deeper into the program and the students get more used to it we may see some collaborations happening particularly in merchandising because there's a lot of merchandising opportunity with this sort of technology but so far we haven't done any of that.
One of the things that could also happen is if the students get really excited about this, they may start suggesting that to other faculty who might perhaps be inspired to extend their courses a
bit in a new way. I can only hope I'll go back to my student that I seriously didn't think that he could get the AI to do what it did and he got it to do what it did and he was so excited by it and he just brings that excitement over and other instructors will come up to me and say insert student name is so excited about the project that he did for you and told me all about it. Okay, great. Let's talk about how we can kind of cross collaborate. Let's talk about how
we can do joint assignments. Let's talk about how my teaching can feed your teaching and grow into something because gives a student a more holistic view of a process as opposed to I need this thing for this course and that thing for that course. I'm all about holistic learning. Can you tell?
I'm sure by the time the students are completing their fashion shows and they've gone through the struggle and then they see things in reality that they start to see the value in adding an electronic or digital practice into their process because some things can be speedier. They can make some different decisions without having to make and remake physically because those adjustments can be made. you can see it in the magic mirror. Try something else. See in the magic mirror again before
you're actually creating it. Have students reflected on that experience a bit and indicated like, "Yeah, I can see how I was super frustrated in your class, but now I can see how I might use this moving forward." I know that in some of the kinds of technology classes I've taught, I've definitely had students who were like super resistant during the class, but then like three years later, I get an email from them saying, "Guess what I'm doing? This fall, I'll be rolling into my third
year teaching the class. So, I'm still waiting for those students to come back. But I will say that I've had some really, really good conversations with students about actually selling their digital designs because beyond creating the physical element, there's the element of selling your design in, I don't know, The Sims or in the metaverse. Of course, I'm a nerd. I have a Metverse account. and my avatar in the Metverse account has an outfit that I purchased
from the Metverse store. So, I've had some really interesting conversations with students about the potential for designing fashion that is strictly digital that will never be made. And that gets to be really interesting conversations and obviously there's no other way to do that. No, digital clothing can do things that real clothing can't. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
So, I do cosplay from time to time. And when you talk about digital clothing that does things that real clothing can't, the engineering that we have to go into to try and make that video game character outfit actually come to life and then make it actually behave the way that it behaves when it's on the avatar to make the skirt fling properly, to make the cape fling properly. You got this feather thing sticking out your shoulder. Like it doesn't even have a
name. We're not really sure what it is, but it's sticking out the character's shoulder and it goes three feet in the air. How do we make that without it wobbling all over the place? And we can use these new digital tools to try and design different sorts of structural elements to the fit so that when we do make it hopefully it behaves the way that it should. But yeah, you can make a whole lot of things in the digital realm that just don't work in the real world.
So could you tell us a little bit more about the fall symposium and what students have done there and how it's worked? So the fall symposium is absolutely my favorite part of the course. It is their final exam in my course and what they do is whatever that long tech project that they decided they were going to do, they go and they present it. And so we try and make it as much
like a symposium as possible. We don't always get people to come, but we invite high school sewing classes and we invite the 4 and we invite every student on campus and all of the faculty to come in and see what the students are doing. And we usually get a half a room full, big lecture hall, half a room full. And the students will present anything from a research paper to a fully realized prototype that people can pick up and
come and talk about. What is really exciting for me is to see the students in this culmination of this project because it's something that is deeply meaningful for them every single time. I mentioned a student who did a prototype pair of pants for wheelchair users. And that student had been in a car accident and she came in with a prototype pair of pants and did a short presentation on why you should do adaptive fashion, why the major fashion housesers should be
paying attention to it. And what she had done for her project was a Tik Tok video explaining how to take a regular pair of pants and make it into an adaptive pair. And she finished really, really quickly. And the first question that I wanted to ask her and I asked her, I said, "Now, how many times did you make that prototype before the one that you brought with you today?" And she said, "I think this is number 16."
But they're so excited and they're so involved and they go so deeply into it because they care so much about what they're presenting. And I try and give them a nice wide audience. And we have the before symposium gathering where I say, "It's okay. I know you're not a public speaker, but you can do this." And they go in and they have that really transformative experience from the fear of public speaking to, "Hey, I'm going to tell you about this thing." It's my
favorite part of the whole class. That's awesome. It's always great to see our students shining and gaining confidence, too, so that when they do go out into the job market, they've already had some practice with this type of thing, which is often a bit of a shock when people first do that if they haven't had those sorts of experiences. Part of the reason that I put it in the glass. At some point, you're going to have to pitch
your designs to somebody. So, this may not be a design, but give us your pitch. Sounds like a great experience for sure. the fact that a student is willing to do something over and over again. That doesn't happen with all the assignments we give in other classes. So that certainly provides a bit of information about the amount of intrinsic motivation that projects of this sort generate, especially when it's going to be realized in front of an audience. It has an audience. I think that's a key
component. The first semester that I ran that, I had a student who wanted to do something on sustainability in fashion. deeply committed to sustainable causes and eco-causes and concerned about the earth and its ecological health. And that student came in with a presentation that would have been fine as a dissertation. She had two slides of references and citations and just the depth that she had gone to. And I remember checking in with her weekly and saying, "This is great." And she's, "But
I have to look into this." No, this is great. this is a two-year college. What you've done is good, but she was determined. And of course, I'm not going to say no. She was determined to go deeper. Well, we always wrap up by asking what's next.
That's a really good question. So, we've revamped the course learning objectives and the description to make it more accurately reflect what we're doing in the class and to introduce some of the very heavy technological elements, the AI and the cutting edge engineering, CAD designing. So, we've got those sort of cemented in place and now I kind of want to see how we can get students thinking differently. students are starting to get the idea of I can make this digital
design. I can create it here. I can make it physically. I can export it. But I really want to start getting them thinking about what that means for the industry as a whole. Because you can sell garments you've never made yet. It flips the entire process on its head. You can make garments that are never designed to be worn physically. They're only ever made to be in that 3D modeling space. And these are just new and different ways of experiencing fashion.
Instead of being something that you just physically put on your body and okay, we're going to walk around in it. It's something that might react to how you walk or it might react to how you move or it might react to the environment that you're in. Although, I'm not sure I would like it if my shirt did something if I walked in the gym. But hey, I want the students to start thinking about those things and think about what the
next steps might be in the industry. So, we know McNe Marcus is starting to put magic mirrors in their flagship stores where users can go in, visitors can go in, they can stand in front of the mirror and you walk into that fitting room and instead of trying things on, you just push the buttons on the side of the wall. Boom. I want to wear that dress. Oh, no. I want it in red. and get the students to start thinking about
what's really possible out there. That sort of big picture thinking is a big part of where I want this class to go. We'll add to that cross collaboration with digital art students, maybe with some CIS students, and start making it into something that's more than just fashion. Well, thanks for giving us lots to think about and maybe motivate some of us to integrate more technology into
our classes. Thank you. This was an interesting conversation and was something a little bit different than what I normally do in my classes and it's nice to hear about these innovative approaches. Thank you. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our T for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts, and other materials on tforeing.com.
Music by Michael Gary Brewer. [Music] [Music]